By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
Issues with mail ballots were miniscule for the November general election in Lincoln County and across Oregon.
The number ballots rejected in Lincoln County because of irregularities increased a bit for the Nov. 3 election, but because there were a record number of ballots cast, the percentage decreased slightly.
That mirrors a statewide trend, according to the Oregon Secretary of State’s office.
There were a record 31,181 ballots returned in Lincoln County in the Nov. 3 election.
County election workers rejected 69 of those because they lacked a signature and another 70 because the signature in the ballot envelope did not match one on a voter registration card, according to a report by Lincoln County Clerk Dana Jenkins submitted to the state.
Another 74 ballots were rejected for being returned without a signature envelope.
That total of 213 ballots rejected was less than 1 percent — 0.68 percent — of all ballots cast in the county.
In November 2016, the last presidential election, there were 178 ballots rejected for irregularities – 96 for no signature, one for a non-matching signature and 81 ballots without a signature envelope, according to Jenkins. That represented 0.69 percent of the total of 25,864 ballots cast.
Statewide, the percent of rejected ballots in both elections was similar — 0.9 percent rejected in 2016 compared with 0.7 percent in 2020.
Jenkins said the biggest difference between the two elections were issues with signatures not matching on ballots and voter registration cards that are generated by the automatic registration by the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles.
“Many signatures that DMV forwards to us are out-of-date and the person’s signature has changed a lot,” Jenkins told YachatsNews. “Some of the registrations through DMV come to us with no signature at all. So we have to send registration cards to these people and they need to fill them out with a new signature and return to us before we can count their ballot. Some people returned the card with their updated signature, but many did not.”
That’s the biggest reason that Lincoln County rejected 70 ballots in November 2020 and just one in 2016, Jenkins said.
Ballot issues drop statewide
A record number of Oregonians voted in the 2020 general election, but the statewide number of ballots rejected for technical reasons dropped from the 2016 general election.
Oregon election officials say 2.4 million ballots were returned in November’s election — 18 percent more than the 2 million ballots returned in 2016.
But the number of ballots rejected for signature problems fell by 5 percent. In the 2016 general election, 17,574 ballots were rejected because their return envelopes were not signed or their signatures did not match those on file with elections officials. Four years later, only 16,680 ballots were rejected for those reasons.
President Donald Trump and his supporters have pointed to the low rejection rate as evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the reason in Oregon is simple.
According to Multnomah County elections department spokesman Eric Sample, state election rules were changed between the two elections to make it easier for voters who failed to sign their ballots to submit a new signature before the final results were certified.
Before the change, voters who did not sign their return envelopes had to physically come into a county elections office before a deadline for their ballots to be counted. After the change, they only had to sign and return a statement that said they are legally qualified to vote and had voted.
Voters whose signatures did not match still had to submit a new voter registration cards for their votes to count. The percent increased between the two elections, but not as much — 50 percent in 2016 and 63 percent in 2020.
— Pamplin Media contributed to this report